KICK OFF MARKETING FOR YOUR SMALL BUSINESS WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

Why should you use social media marketing strategy for a small business? The simple reason is that it is the most used online platform with more than 4 billion active users, and 1.3 million new users join every day!

Any new business, small or medium, needs to create a relevant online presence. And it needs to create awareness of its business, and a user base. With such a huge active user base, no other strategy can be as beneficial as the social media marketing strategy, to build a presence.

Why Social Media marketing for small business is so important and what are the benefits?

First reason is the whole world uses the social media! And the another reason is the way people interact with each other using these platforms.

The social media platforms has many advanced features such as, posts, videos, images, live videos, podcasts, webinars, comments, likes, sharing, etc. And those features allow users to engage in various ways and connect with a lot of other people across the world.

And taking all these feature into consideration, marketing with social media can fetch a lot of benefits like,

Increased visibility and a wider user base.
Increased brand awareness.
Increased traffic and higher search engine ranking.
Building trust and authority.
Direct engagement with customers and increased customer satisfaction.
More conversions.
Developing thought leadership.
Tracking and analyzing the marketing performance.
Cost effective marketing campaign and business development.

These are the most usual and desired benefits which you would want to achieve with any marketing effort. But social media marketing services will bring many other small ones that you can realize once you start using it.

Different Social Media Platforms

The most popular platform is Facebook, but there are others also which are widely used for different types of social interaction. Such as,

Facebook	To connect socially by sharing posts, videos, images etc. and engage with them using comments, like etc.	2.5 billion monthly users
Instagram	For social engagement, but it is mainly used to share images and videos.	1 billion monthly users
Twitter	A micro blogging or comments based platform. Used for social media, political and other types of interactions.	330 million monthly users
LinkedIn	It is for professional and corporate networking, mainly used for business development, job searching and hiring.	310 million monthly users
YouTube	The most popular video sharing platform.	2 billion monthly users
Quora	A very good social platform to ask questions, share views and knowledge.	330 million monthly users
Snapchat	For sharing user generated content, and it is for real-time only.	360 million monthly users
Pinterest	It is used by industries like, fashion, interior designing, food etc. to share high quality images and DIY videos.	322 million monthly users

Social Media Marketing Strategies –

Define your target audience – You can’t just throw content all over the social media. Everyone is not interested in your business, and without knowing who could be your target audience, your efforts will not bring desired results. Defining your potential users and creating content are actually correlated. So, defining your target audience means creating user personas by doing an extensive research on their social demographics and other things such as, likes, requirements, life and career goals etc. Based on their personas, you need to create content that resonates with them. Those users are possibly interested in your product, so any content like blogs, messages, posts, videos, or ads will connect with them and create awareness about your business.

How do you research your target audience?

Research on where your competitors are targeting. It is quite natural that businesses within your industry will be targeting the users which could be your target audience.
Research on product reviews and comments posted by users. It will also give you better insights about who the users are and where they are.
On which social channels your audience is present most of the time. It gives you a better idea on where to spend your time and money for marketing your business.
Directly engage with your present connections in different channels. Ask them relevant questions, create surveys, polls, interviews and get insights from their answers.
If you already have some customers, you can use their data to get an idea of your possible user persona.
Using tactics like google search, keywords research etc. and using different tools like, Google analytics, Facebook insights and others, you will discover a lot of information like their demographics, interests, locations and more.

All these information will help you creating buyer personas. And after that you can create a campaign targeted towards them.

2. Create relevant organic content – A good content is always informative, educational and resolving. Ask a question to yourself as a customer, and try to identify the problems faced by users. You can ask your users directly about their issues, likes and requirements. And after that create content which fulfils their requirements, provides information and resolves their problems.

Create content according to search intent of users. They do search for different reasons using online search engines. The reasons are the search intents, and use them to create content. It will give your content a higher search ranking and reach out to more users.

3. Use different type of content – It can be in any form like, blog posts, vlogs, social media post, infographics, images, videos, live videos, podcasts, webinars, etc.

Different type of contents will attract users across various ages and groups. And the trends suggest that video is the most preferred content across a wide range of users. Sometimes, reading long form of content like blogs consumes a lot of time and that might result in disinterest. So to avoid that situation, marketers are leveraging other forms of content to generate more interest among customers.

Webinars and podcasts are very effective for live engagement with your users. It also builds trust and authority among them.

Infographics and images are a short form of content used to attract and provide relevant information to users more often.

You can use links and CTAs (call to action) within your content, and by accessing them, users will be directed to your desired location like a website. This technique is very useful especially with e-commerce businesses.

4. Sharable content – Sometimes the organic content finds it very hard to reach out to its users. So, sharable content can be used to overcome this problem.

A sharable content will be entertaining, informative, meaningful, helpful, and attractive enough to pursue people to share it with their online social community. This content resonates with their interest and may have an emotional appeal with it. It can be a trending post or a valuable information. Whatever it may be, but helps you get more traction.

5. Use referrals and promotional offers – Organic content or sharable content doesn’t always work for the desired goals. Your ultimate goal is to generate leads and convert them into buyers.

The persuasive techniques like referrals and promotions designed using buyers’ psychology, can be a game changer for your business. Everybody likes complimentary rewards as they give them some sort of satisfaction and joy. So, why don’t you give them the opportunity to experience that joy, and help your business get more traction?

6. Social Ads – As I said that organic isn’t enough to win the world, you have to use other strategies also. And ads are one of the most used and relevant strategies for marketing and business development.

Social media ads are used to target audience and generate higher conversions. These ads are specifically designed for your target audience and compel them to take actions desired by you.

If users visit your business website, but don’t buy anything, you can retarget them with other ads or promotional offers to compel them to take actions.

According to research data, social media ads and paid ads are the biggest revenue generator for businesses.

Marketers use creative and persuasive tone to create gripping ads. And all the main social channels offer features to create ads. You can use research data and insights provided by those platforms to create relevant ads.

And you can use A/B testing to check which type of ad works best for your promotion.

7. Analyze and check the performance – Your marketing campaign needs to align with your business goal. And you need to check the performance to make sure it is going in the right direction. It is important to track the performance to make any necessary adjustments required to make it efficient.

To do this, you have many tools provided by different social channels. You can use those tools to measure different metrics like,

Reach – It is important to reach out to more users. And this metric lets you track the performance regarding it.

Followers – The more number of followers suggests the increasing popularity of you campaign.

Engagement – If you have more reach and followers, but they are not significant if you don’t find engagements by them. Engagements are measured by likes, shares, tweets, retweets, comments, etc. If you find more engagements, it will help you to decide which type of content delivers results.

Clicks – They are also a part of engagements, but a click directs a user to your website. So, it provides insights about your traffic. If your click rate is low, you can change your ad campaign to improve it, and if you are getting more clicks, then you know how to enhance that campaign for more conversions.

So, social media platforms come with plenty of resources in terms of users, marketing techniques and tools. It is the best and cost effective way to start a campaign. Your business needs an online presence and a good development strategy. You can use social media marketing services to make your start-up a full fledged growing business.